INCLUSION OF THEORIES AND PRACTICES OF CHILD FRIENDLY SCHOOL IN THE CURRICULUM OF TEACHER PROGRAMME
INCLUSION OF THEORIES AND PRACTICES OF CHILD FRIENDLY SCHOOL IN THE CURRICULUM OF TEACHER PROGRAMME
INTRODUCTION
A child-friendly school ensures every child has an environment that is physically safe, emotionally secure and psychologically enabling. Children are natural learners, but this capacity to learn can be undermined and sometimes destroyed. According to UNICEF (2009), a child friendly school recognizes, encourages and supports children’s growing capacities as learners by providing a school culture, teaching behaviours and school curriculum content that are focused on learning and the hearer.
Santrock (2006), stated that child friendly schools are aimed to develop a learning environment in which children are motivated and are able to learn; the (teachers) staff members are friendly, welcoming, concerned and attend to the health, social and emotional safety issues of the children. Teachers create effective and conducive classrooms, they are able to identify children that are not comfortable, find out the reasons for their discomfort and proffer alternative solutions as well as guiding the children on using the best case scenario to solve their problems.
Child-friendly school is a child-seeking school. It actively identifies excluded children to get them enrolled in school and included in learning, treating children as subjects with rights and State as duty-bearers with obligations to fulfill these rights, and demonstrating, promoting, and helping to monitor the rights and well-being of all children in the community.
Child-friendly school is a child-centered school. It acts in the best interests of the child, leading to the realization of the child’s full potential, and concerned both about the “whole” child (including her health, nutritional status, and well-being) and about what happens to children—in their families and communities-before they enter school and after they leave the school.
A school is considered “child friendly” when it provides a safe, clean, healthy and protective environment for children. At Child Friendly Schools, child rights are respected, and all children – including children who are poor, disabled, living with HIV or from ethnic and religious minorities are treated equally. The school is a significant personal and social environment in the lives of its students (children).
ACHIEVEMENT OF A CHILD FRIENDLY SCHOOL IN NIGERIA
Child-friendly school must reflect an environment of good quality characterized by several essential aspects:
Introduction of School feeding programme as a means of improving Child Friendly Schools
Two main strategies have been used to improve the nutritional status, attendance rates and cognition of school age children
- The provision of meals and snacks for eating in school
- Food for Education (FFE) interventions in which food given at school may be taken home.
These strategies are underpinned by hypothetical pathways that link the provision of school meals with improved education access and achievement, in two ways. Firstly, educational outcomes may improve through increased enrolment and time in school due to reducing the cost to the parent of sending a child to school and benefits to the family from providing take home food. Secondly, educational outcomes may improve through enhanced attention, cognition and behaviour resulting from relief of hunger and from better nutritional status (if the quality and quantity of food is adequate and the supply continues for some time).
Inclusive of children
- Does not exclude, discriminate, or stereotype on the basis of difference.
- Provides education that is free and compulsory, affordable and accessible, especially to families and children at risk.
- Respects diversity and ensures equality of learning for all children (e.g., girls, working children, children of ethnic minorities and affected by HIV/AIDS, children with disabilities, victims of exploitation and violence).
- Responds to diversity by meeting the differing circumstances and needs of children (e.g., based on gender, social class, ethnicity, and ability level).
Effective for learning
- Promotes good quality teaching and learning processes with individualized instruction appropriate to each child’s developmental level, abilities, and learning style and with active, cooperative, and democratic learning methods.
- Provides structured content and good quality materials and resources.
- Enhances teacher capacity, morale, commitment, status, and income — and their own recognition of child rights.
- Promotes quality learning outcomes by defining and helping children learn what they need to learn and teaching them how to learn.
INCLUSION OF THEORIES AND PRACTICES OF CHILD FRIENDLY SCHOOL IN THE CURRICULUM OF TEACHER PROGRAMME
Healthy and Protective of children
- Ensures a healthy, hygienic, and safe learning environment, with adequate water and sanitation facilities and healthy classrooms, healthy policies and practices (e.g., a school free of drugs, corporal punishment, and harassment), and the provision of health services such as nutritional supplementation and counseling.
- Provides life skills-based health education.
- Promotes both the physical and the psycho-socio-emotional health of teachers and learners.
- Helps to defend and protect all children from abuse and harm.
- Provides positive experiences for children.
Gender-sensitive
- Promotes gender equality in enrolment and achievement.
- Eliminates gender stereotypes.
- Guarantees girl-friendly facilities, curricula, textbooks, and teaching learning processes. socializes girls and boys in a non-violent environment.
- Encourages respect for each others’ rights, dignity, and equality.
Involved with children, families, and communities
- Child-centred – promoting child participation in all aspects of school life.
- Family-focused — working to strengthen families as the child’s primary caregivers and educators and helping children, parents, and teachers establish harmonious relationships.
- Community-based – encouraging local partnership in education, acting in the community for the sake of children, and working with other actors to ensure the fulfillment of childrens’ rights.
Experience is now showing that a framework of rights-based, child-friendly schools can be a powerful tool for both helping to fulfill the rights of children and providing them an education of good quality.
At the national level, for ministries, development agencies, and civil society organizations, the framework can be used as a normative goal for policies and programmes leading to child-friendly systems and environments, as a focus for collaborative programming leading to greater resource allocations for education, and as a component of staff training.
At the community level, for school staff, parents, and other community members, the framework can serve as both a goal and a tool of quality improvement through localized self-assessment, planning, and management and as a means for mobilizing the community around education and child rights.
INCLUSION OF THEORIES AND PRACTICES OF CHILD FRIENDLY SCHOOL IN THE CURRICULUM OF TEACHER PROGRAMME
Theme (Project) Based Teaching
Teachers should realize that some children need more time to learn and to progress than others. Using theme (project)based teaching teachers can give different children different tasks (some are easier or more difficult than others). This will encourage children to work in teams (inpairs, or small groups). The teams should be put together in such a way that they reflect the diversity of abilities and backgrounds in our classrooms.
This will foster peer teaching and learning. The tasks are designed based on their individual abilities and stage of development. And the lessons, thus, should be structured around daily or weekly “themes” rather than unconnected pieces of information.
Gender and Teaching
Teachers and schools may unintentionally reinforce gender stereotypes. Teacher-student interactions are the clearest form of classroom inequities. Teachers call on boys more often than girls, ask boys more higher-order questions, give boys more extensive feedback, and use longer wait-time with boys than girls. Teachers fail to see girls’ raised hands, and limit their interactions with girls to social, non-academic topics. Girls are rarely chosen to give a demonstration or help with an experiment.
Give more responsibilities to boys than girls (such as being the head of the class or head of a group). Make use of textbooks and other learning materials that reinforce negative gender stereotypes. Moreover, many teachers may be completely unaware that they treat girls and boys differently. In many textbooks, females are still under represented. Pictures of women appear less frequently than men and more often show women in traditional roles.
When men and women are shown in the same picture, the woman is in a subordinate role, such as the female nurse with the male doctor. The text may still use sex-biased language and contain no examples of women scientists. Many of the traditional topics of science and examples favor boys’ interests and experiences. Girls favor topics that emphasize health, food, and safety rather than the more common topics that relate science to industry and the military.
Preparing for Learning that is Meaningful
Meaningful Learning” means that we link what the children are learning in school (topic and content), and what the children are taught to through their everyday lives in their families and communities. Teaching is a complex activity. We must consider many things when preparing for meaningful learning. No one can force a child to learn.
Children will learn when they are motivated to learn, when they are given opportunities to learn effectively, when they feel that the skills they will learn will lead to success, when they receive positive feedback from friends, teachers, and parents who compliment them on how well they are learning.
To prepare for meaningful learning, here are some questions the teachers must answer before preparing the lessons as follows: (1)Motivation: Is the topic meaningful and relevant to the children? Are they interested in what they are expected to learn?; (2) Opportunities: Are the opportunities suited to the development al level of the children? For instance, is the topic too hard or too easy for many of the children?
Are the activities appropriate for both girls and boys? Are they appropriate for children with diverse backgrounds and abilities?; (3)Skills: Do the children have the skills to achieve the expected result? (4)Feedback: Is the type of assessment and feedback given to the children designed to increase motivation to continue learning? (UNESCO, 2015).
INCLUSION OF THEORIES AND PRACTICES OF CHILD FRIENDLY SCHOOL IN THE CURRICULUM OF TEACHER PROGRAMME
Use a Variety of Teaching Methods and Activities
Research shows that children learn indifferent ways either because of hereditary factors, experience, environment, or their personal traits. Consequently, teachers need to use a variety of teaching methods and classroom activities to meet the different learning needs of the children in their classes. At first, it seems to be a frightening idea for those who teach in large classrooms containing 50 different children. So, they tend to use “rote learning” such as memorization and repetition and remembering. This seems to be an easy method to manage many children, however it is boring. Using different methods for teaching can be more rewarding for both teachers and students.
Children’ Various Ways of Learning
According to Reid (1999) children have their own learning style. Some may learn best through listening to the teachers, reading and note taking (auditory learners),others through visual materials (visual learners), and still others through body movement (playing games, sports) or musical activities (Kinesthetic).Some like to work on problems individually (field independent learners), while others like to interact with others to find solutions (field dependent learners).
Teachers should observe and discover the children’s preferred ways of learning in their inclusive classrooms as to help all children to learn best. In addition, Gardner (1999) suggests that children also have personal intelligence profiles that contribute to their learning style. They may use several pathways to help them to understand and remember. Therefore, it is important for teachers to use different teaching strategies that cover a combination of several learning pathways.
Gardner (1999) mentions several pathways by which children learn as follows: (1)Verbal or linguistic children think and learn through written andspoken words, memory, and recall; (2)Logical or mathematical children think and learn though reasoning and calculation. They can easily use numbers, recognize abstract patterns, and take precise measurements; (3)Visual or spatial children like art, such as drawing, painting, or sculpture. They can easily read maps, charts, and diagrams; (4)Body or kinesthetic children learn through body movement, games, and drama; (5)Touch or Tactile: Children with hearing and sight problems can learn better through touching;
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, Child Friendly Schools are educational units that isable to guarantee, fulfill, respect the rights of children, and protect children from violence, discrimination and other mistreatment and support children’s participation, especially in planning, policy, learning, and complaints mechanisms.
Also added Aqib in the ramaha school model, the teacher’s child must realize that the potential of children is different so that in providing opportunities for their children to choose activities and play activities that fit their respective interests, and must be more prejudiced to children. Child Friendly School Indicators in terms of schools, families and communities in building Child Friendly Schools. The family is the closest community to children. The ideal family environment for children is a harmonious, healthy family environment both physically and mentally.
REFERENCES
Bredenberg, K. & Heeyit, Y. (2004). The Child-friendly Schools’ movement and impacts on children’s learning: Practical applications in Cambodia. Working Papers: Expanded Basic Education Program, Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Clair, N., Miske, S. & Patel, D. (2012). Child rights and quality education: child-friendly schools in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). European Education, 44(2), 5-22.
